Danielle Crittenden is the wife of David Frum and a contributor at the left-wing Huffington Post. In a column, she defends her husband as an honest man speaking the truth, as the innocent victim of unfair, hateful treatment from conservatives. She’s as demented as he is. For starters, it doesn’t occur to her that being a regular writer at Huffington Post, where this column is published, renders her portrayal of her husband as an honest conservative just a tad questionable? For finishers, it doesn’t occur to her that there’s a difference between criticizing conservatism and seeking, from the standard leftist perspective, to delegitimize conservatism and make it surrender to liberalism, which is what her husband has been doing, even as he continues to call himself a conservative?

Crittenden’s stupid, unreflective apologia for her husband is a further illustration of how people today construct extravagantly vain fantasies of themselves, impenetrable to reason.

In our fragmented, consumerist society, we no longer live inside Plato’s Cave. Instead, each individual has his own, personalized Plato’s Cave, from which he sends out a twitter every five minutes to his “followers.” See David Frum’s twitters, or twits, or whatever they’re called.

However, another Crittenden piece, about a $200 a plate Sarah Palin charity dinner appearance in Hamilton, Ontario that she attended with her husband, is worth reading. Palin received a six figure fee for chattering for 40 minutes about the same stuff she chatters about every time she opens her mouth. We could say, with Crittenden, isn’t it objectionable that Palin gets paid a royal sum for providing nothing of substance? Of course it is. But Palin is no different in this regard from myriad other empty headed media celebrities who also command six figures or close to it for sharing their inanities with a live audience. The personality of a celebrity exerts a magical emanation on people in today’s society, and, like Keats sitting in his dark bower listening in ecstasy to the nightingale’s song, they find it blissful and fulfilling, and well worth $200 a shot, to sit at a dinner table in a banquet hall bathing in a celebrity’s emanation for an hour or two. It seems that in addition to each of our personalized Plato’s Caves, we still live in a collective Plato’s Cave as well.

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Ben W., who sent me Crittenden’s articles and her husband’s twitter page and thus started me on the above dithyramb, writes:

You can tell a man by his friends. Take a look at Frum’s Twitter account to see who he’s following: